


Bring Your Love to a Keith Fight

by troof



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blind Character, Body Worship, Keith loves Kuron AND Shiro, Kosmo - Freeform, M/M, Self-Harm, and Shiro loves them too, but only to protect Keith, season 6 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 08:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16572878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troof/pseuds/troof
Summary: Shiro's clone didn't die immediately after the fight. There was an interim period where he grappled with his own existence, his feelings for Keith, and his need for Shiro.





	Bring Your Love to a Keith Fight

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about quantum physics

If one more person asked Keith why he always carried a knife, he was going to...ask them politely to stop. He didn’t want to be mean, but he yelled at Lance the first time, and he would have scolded Romelle despite her situation had he not realized she was genuinely curious. Her question didn’t carry the implication that it was “paranoid” or “unnatural” as his classmates whispered on Earth; she really wanted to know.

“Family heirloom,” he responded, exaggerating its coolness. But was he? It sounded awesome to him that someone would have something in their family that had been passed down through generations since he never met his grandparents and just found his mom, but she had left him with it at birth and the sight of it had rekindled their long-lost relationship, so no, he didn’t think he was exaggerating at all.

“That’s wonderful! Can I hold it?” Romelle asked. Keith handed it over.

The truth of the matter was that anything his mom left him, he would have carried with him at all times and brought along with him into space. Whether she’d gifted him a ring, a handkerchief, or one of Kolivan’s braids, he would have treasured it for a long time as a connection to her. But did it mean something that she left a knife, though? 

They always were fighters, the Koganes. He and his dad and his mom. The longer he carried it with him, the more it made him feel safe. He wouldn’t have to worry if a coyote attacked him in the desert or if Voltron got ambushed. One day, when he left it in his room at the Garrison and noticed that he was wary of corners and checking his peripherals constantly, he realized that the real reason he carried it was because he always expected a fight.

It had been that way ever since he could remember; so it still was when he followed Shiro to an unknown asteroid in a stolen ship. The visions on the whale had been so lucid that he didn’t believe the future could hold any other possibility. They would fight. And there was no getting out of it.

They locked eyes across the room. The blend of monochrome he was tracking near the large tube on the end did nothing to get itself up and close the distance between him and Keith. It screamed in anguish, sound reverberating off thousands of capsules but scattering before it could echo. Afterwards, there was no humming of machinery, or footsteps of friends thudding on the floor in the next hallway over like in the castle at nights--just silence.

Keith ran to Shiro, who struggled to restrain his right arm with his left and had long ago fallen to his knees. He never remembered running so fast in his life.

“Go,” Shiro shouted at Keith, pleading with his eyes. There was no way Keith was going, he’d just found Shiro. 

A grunt tore from Shiro’s throat. His arm lunged out, but he fell backwards at the last second. 

“I want to hurt you, Keith, I don’t know what’s happening. There’s something in my head, something in my--” his eyes rolled back as he fought to keep consciousness. “Something in my head that’s making me do this, please go.”

Visions flashed through Keith’s head that he had seen on the whale, but Shiro had never hurt him before. Maybe if he said the right thing, the strange light in Shiro’s eyes would leave, and he would be the same Takashi Shirogane, who gently collapsed into his arms after Kerberos. Alternate realities existed, right? He had to try.

“I’m not going! I don’t know what happened back at the castle, but I know it _isn’t you_. It isn’t you, Shiro, please wake up.”

“I can’t hold myself back.” His body spasmed ---as if it was trying to run away, but his feet wouldn’t take him past two steps. Something else took control and backhanded Keith so hard he tasted blood. Keith looked up from the ground where he was and came face to face with Shiro’s glowing arm, much closer than he remembered.

“Shiro--”

He thought he saw his eyes flash, but then they went blank again and he lunged for Keith. He felt an arm around his windpipe, and fingers digging into his jaw causing pain at the same time he couldn’t breathe. Shiro had so much weight behind him when he was crushing his larynx. 

Things blurred.

And then the pressure was gone. It was like all the strength gradually drained from the bionic arm...Keith coughed and sputtered and looked up at the sky, dazed. Had Shiro really been about to kill him? He couldn’t remember oxygen ever feeling so good…

Slowly, he became aware of Shiro banging his head against the ground repeatedly behind him, trying to stop this influence that neither of them could touch. Keith wanted to yell at him to stop, but what came out was an incomprehensible, strangled sound. 

Once the banging finally, finally stopped, Shiro faced him with dull eyes, but they seemed a little less frantic. When he spoke next, it might have even been him. Keith found himself automatically reassuring Shiro even though everything was light years away from all right.

“There’s something...evil inside my head.”

“We’ll take care of it, don’t hurt yourself, we’ll find another way.”

“No--no.” 

He lowered his head to the floor again. Keith held him up because Shiro was being insane and he wasn’t about to let this happen. They would _find a way_.

He wanted to tell him that, but by the time he regained control of his own voice, Shiro had already pressed the blinding purple emanence of his Galra arm to the surface of his own eyes. 

It happened so fast. Fights happened fast; when they practiced on the castle ship, a round with the gladiator lasted a few minutes, at most, and when they sparred against each other, neither one could go more than one minute without getting a pin. Decisive things that Keith was re-learning to process while his lungs reinflated.

Shiro thrashed around after that, arms flailing wildly. The arm the arena had given him acted on its own accord, powering up and blasting the far wall in an arc with a ray as powerful as the ones Keith had seen on spaceships. Keith amputated it in the pause that followed. Belatedly, he realized that that must have been what held the code that hijacked Shiro and started all their problems. It was that easy.

After that, he stroked the hair back from Shiro’s forehead and contemplated reality.

Maybe it was a choice he made along the way that split their futures, but he couldn’t remember doing anything significantly different from what he would have done otherwise, so maybe it was just chance. Either way, now, he was dealing with the unknown, and as horrible as it was, it must have been for the better because Shiro was alive.

He grimaced at the sight of Shiro’s wounds.

“Why’d you have to hurt yourself to protect me?” Keith mused as he kicked himself internally. “All I ever wanted was for you to be safe.” Shiro must have been exhausted, because he wasn’t stirring awake. “I hate seeing you like this.”

He leaned over Shiro’s body, hoping for a twitch or a heartbeat or warm breath filtering weakly out of his mouth. His chest rose and fell steadily, though; that was a good sign. If he didn’t wake up, Keith was going to maneuver them both back into Black, but Shiro heard him and regained consciousness in a matter of minutes, eyes leaking furiously. 

“I love you,” Keith whispered, pressing a kiss to his forehead. He didn’t know what Shiro had seen or what he would remember, but they would discuss that after paying a visit to the healing pods at the castle. 

Looking at the clones, Keith wasn’t sure if this was the real Shiro, but he was tired. He wanted to _believe_. And they needed those healing pods fast.

Black seemed to sense this and scooped them up, taking them back without an input on the controls from Keith. They would discuss this later, for sure. No friend of Keith’s was going to hurt himself on Keith’s behalf.

\---

“I had no choice. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting you, especially after I tore up the team. Hurting you--that was just the last straw.”

“You know I’d rather you hurt me, right? You’ve been through enough pain.”

“Not hurt you, Keith. I was going to _kill_ you. You didn’t feel the rage that I felt. It was that or never see you again.”

Keith shook his head. “No. No, no, no, we’re a _team_ , Shiro, we would have figured it out.

“We didn’t have time.”

“Dammit, Shiro!” 

Keith pounded a fist on Shiro’s chest and banged his helmet against his armor, hiding his face in his chest. He felt so guilty that Shiro had maimed himself on Keith’s behalf. That wasn’t what love meant, an endless cycle of reckless self-sacrifice. He did it once, for Voltron, when he was preparing to drive his ship into that shield, but that was different. That was for the team. By stepping into battle, any one of them ran the risk of dying anyway. And...that was his own body. Not Shiro’s. This wasn’t okay for Shiro. 

He felt a weak hand on his head.

“Did you...say something to me after I passed out?” 

“Like what?”

Keith knew exactly what, but it wasn’t the right time to say it again. The lights were too bright.

“Nothing. I wasn’t thinking straight.” A little rollercoaster in Keith’s heart rounded the top of the track and plummeted.

They sat on Keith’s bed, Keith with a mug of tea Allura had made for him after his ordeal and Shiro with black cloth tied over his eyes because the healing pod didn’t work fast enough to repair all the damage he had done. if Keith pretended, he could tell himself it was just a blindfold. Shiro slumped over to his left side, not yet used to the difference in weight.

They danced around a dangerous truth here, circling until an opportunity opened to go in for the kill.

“Hypothetically, what would you do if I was a clone?”

On the whale, Keith had pictured a messy reunion. During the first few months, it was hard to forget about the war, the constant sense that he needed to be somewhere, fighting for the fate of the universe before it moved on for the worse hanging over his head, but eventually, those thoughts didn’t come anymore. 

He talked with Krolia, wanting to fill her in on everything that had happened in his life, the good and the bad, and a lot of it happened to involve Shiro. He had come to terms with his feelings slowly, and it was something his mom didn’t rush. 

But he didn’t think they would go anywhere until one night, Krolia said, “It sounds like he cares for you very much. You say he had a boyfriend back on Earth?”

Keith felt his cheeks turning red in the heat of the fire. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean--our relationship was different.”

“How?”

_He kept me out of trouble_ , Keith thought of saying, but it wasn’t just that. What about the times Shiro taught him to be fearless when they were racing hoverbikes or sneaking out to stargaze? Actually, now that he thought about it, he and Shiro would have gotten into trouble if anyone found what they were doing; Shiro just knew how not to get caught. 

_He told me to believe in myself. I was sort of his project_ \--but that wasn’t right, either. Keith was never Shiro’s project; they were friends, and they spent a lot of time together. 

Maybe he could argue that they never did anything romantic? Stargazing could be construed as romantic depending on how you looked at it, and since they spent so much time together, they inevitably had several meals together even if it was just take-out on Shiro’s floor…

“It’s hard to describe,” Keith settled on finally. “All I can say is he never made any advances. He never tried to kiss me, or touch me--wait, that last part isn’t true.” Keith blushed and pressed his lips together as he realized he had already said too much. Well--more than he was accustomed to saying. This was his mom they were talking about, and they had two years on a whale to fill--he wasn’t exactly going to be keeping any secrets.

“He touched you?”

“No, well--not inappropriately. Sometimes I would be studying and he would lay his hand on my shoulder when he wanted my attention or wanted to make me feel better. We had a special handshake?”

“I see.”

“And by that, I do mean an actual handshake, that wasn’t a euphemism for anything.” He thought, too, how he and Shiro would spar together on late nights, and how the boundary of touch between their bodies was pretty much nonexistent, but he also didn’t. Want to think about these things. 

“Did you ever touch him?”

Keith reeled. “Whoa, Mom, that’s a _little_ bit of a personal question.”

“I’m just saying, even if he didn’t do anything, sometimes people can be a little shy. That doesn’t mean they don’t feel. Galra are notorious for being bad with feelings.”

Because even though he had all the time in the world to think and reflect and catch up with his mother, it felt private. Sometimes, when Shiro smiled, it flooded Keith’s chest with warmth, and he got the sensation it was for him, and only him. 

Now that he thought about it, he _hadn’t_ really touched Shiro. Eventually, the dreams came; they started with Keith helping Shiro adjust the collar on his new uniform, and they snowballed until Keith was sound asleep at four in the morning, imagining how he would curl inwards as Shiro’s gaze swept over his body, telling him not to be shy, his warmth inside him as he whispered sugar in his ear. The words he said slipped through his memory every time he woke up, but just to be safe, he started sleeping on the other side of the grassy knoll until he got it under control.

He thought about kissing Shiro when he returned. If there was the slightest chance Shiro returned his feelings, they would have the sloppiest makeout session pressed against the skin of the castle. He wouldn’t even care who saw. But here, the air was stale, and it felt like something was missing, just like it had the last time Shiro escaped from the Galra.

\---

“But are you?” Keith raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not sure. I’ve been feeling really strange lately. It’s been better since you cut off my arm. Still...I don’t know.”

“Well, if you don’t know, how can I say, for sure? I’m not sure I even could.”

Keith took a shuddering breath and he examined the evidence filed away inside him. He didn’t want Keith to lead. He didn’t take input from the other paladins. He stopped listening to Keith. For goodness’ sake, his favorite ice cream was vanilla even though it had been cookies and cream since he was ten. 

Shiro Ied him to a facility with thousands of clones of himself, a facility he said he had _no idea even existed._ Why would he bring him there if it didn’t have something to do with his origin?

Everything else was much less hard to face.

“You look like Shiro. You protected me, even when you were being controlled.”

“But, hypothetically...where would we be?

“I don’t feel like myself anymore. My right arm. I can’t do things like I used to, and I can’t help the team in this...condition. Back when the disease was killing me, I thought if I just had one more year to be alive, everything would be worth it, but now...I just don’t know.”

Keith closed the distance between them so their legs were touching and encouraged him to wrap his remaining arm around Keith’s torso.

“You can hold me like you used to. I thought I’d lost my place here, once. Maybe I still have. But then Black needed a pilot, and she took me again? You may think I’ve taken over for Black, but...I can’t do it without you. I mean, I could, because that’s what you wanted, but...I need to know you’re safe. It’s the only thing that gives me peace of mind.

“That’s what scares me most about this whole thing. If it turns out you’re not real, that means Shiro’s still out there. And I don’t have any idea how to find him.”

Shiro’s arm dropped from his back. They pieced together a timeline after that starting with when Shiro defeated Zarkon, but Shiro’s memory was too vague for them to glean any insights.

“I would have to be with the Galra if my body disappeared after the fight, but they could have taken me anywhere in the galaxy, or cloned me. There’s too many possibilities.”

“What about when you escaped?”

“I remember someone standing over me, but that tells me nothing about whether or not I’m real.” Shiro sighed. “But we need to face facts, here.”

For Shiro’s sake, he was right, and Keith said as much.

“Are you going to be all right finding your way around the castle? We don’t have anything you could use as a stick. You could hold onto my elbow and I could lead you around.”

“I don’t think we should be touching each other right now,” Shiro said with some effort. “We should give each other space.”

“O-okay, I’ll ask Hunk. He’s almost your height.” This came as a shock to Keith, because all he wanted to do was press Shiro against his chest and never let go, but if he would be more comfortable with someone else after this revelation, he had every right. He chose Hunk because he was the most empathetic, even if he did think too much about food.

He watched Hunk take care of Shiro when he couldn’t make his way around just by trailing an outstretched finger along the walls. The castle corridors had a circular configuration, so one wall led into another. He stopped before every obstacle, and tried to match Shiro’s pace so he wasn’t dragging him along the corridors, but the pair still made good time. Keith asked him about it, and Hunk told him it was far less intuitive than it seemed. At one point, he was grateful he had asked Hunk to take this job, because he was afraid that had it been him, he would have rushed it or become frustrated and it would have become the blind leading the blind.

He wasn’t good at these things--taking care of people. He wished he was. Even Pidge was more helpful than he was, trying to engineer a vision-restoring visor from old scrap parts.

“Let me show you around for today. I know better places. Do you really want to spend most of your time in the kitchen?” Keith begged once he had him cornered.

“I don’t know, it smells pretty good in here,” Shiro said.

“Come on, why don’t you give Hunk a break? He’s probably tired.”

“Hunk, are you tired?” Shiro asked from his seat a safe distance away from the stove at which Hunk was cooking with his chef’s hat on and his back turned, fiddling with the dials and bringing the day’s soup down to a simmer.

Hunk yawned. “Yep, but not more than usual. I’m always tired. Helping you around has given me a reason to go through the day with more energy.”

“You’re not helping here!”

“What? Oh, Sorry.”

Keith didn't need a knife to glare daggers. 

After a few more tries it became obvious Shiro wasn’t going to acquiesce, so Keith left the kitchen and came back carrying Kosmo, pawing at his chest forcefully while Keith tried to hold on around the fur tickling his nose and vision, and dumped him on the ground.

“What about this?”

“Is he a seeing-eye dog now?”

“He’s not trained, but being an alien life form, he’s extremely intelligent. Should help you with your woes. I know how you like your...independence. I mean, he teleports. You can't get much better than that.”

Shiro reached out and ruffled the fur on the wolf’s head. Kosmo nuzzled into his leg. Keith smiled at the sight of them getting along. He explained to Kosmo beforehand how very important this was for his best friend, but wolves didn’t always listen.

“Thanks, Keith. You’re the best.”

It became so natural to have Shiro around again that this time he placed a hand on Shiro’s shoulder automatically, only to have him flinch and shrug it off. Somewhere along the line, Keith must have misinterpreted.

“Anytime.”

\---

He barged into Shiro’s room that evening.

“What’s wrong?” asked Keith.

“You really don’t know?” 

Watching everyone else touching Shiro, having Shiro depend on them for things like getting to the bridge or providing a description of the layout of the mission’s simulated battlefield had started to get to him. They came into constant contact, but there seemed to be a wall between them. When Shiro shrugged off his hand earlier, it felt like a slap to the face.

“I’m sorry I’m not him. But I can’t change that.”

“I know that! Why do I care?” Shiro flinched as Keith yelled, but other than that, he didn’t react. “You used to put your hand on my shoulder all the time, and now suddenly I can’t? You won’t even let me help you around. Is there any way I can initiate basic human contact in a way that won’t leave you majorly offended?”

“I didn’t know it meant that much to you.”

“You do,” Keith said quietly.

“Okay, well, anything’s fine, really, just don’t--do anything you would only do to him.”

Keith’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“You can’t fall in love with a clone, Keith. If you want to use me, fine, but if we don’t find him, I don’t want to see what this will do to you.”

In love??? Keith clenched his jaw. Shiro did hear what he said before they came back. So why had he said he didn't? Shiro reached out to comfort Keith, but Keith swerved out of range.

“Don’t--touch me. Keep having the other paladins help you around.” Shiro grit his teeth, but didn’t say anything. Keith clicked the lights off, but unfortunately, reality was still visible, clear as day. It was time to go to bed.

As always, thoughts swirled around in his head like restless ghosts. Shiro had rejected him. It was understandable considering what he was going through, but Keith had convinced himself after two years that maybe Shiro would love him too. It was still worth letting him know, he supposed, but he couldn’t help feeling let down. 

He hated parting on bad terms, but he wasn’t doing any good in Shiro’s presence.

He curled towards the wall in the darkness, bringing the blanket over his shoulder. He just wished he could do something for him. Shiro had given up his sight to save Keith, and compared to that, his feelings were nothing in return. 

But how on Earth was he supposed to solve an existential crisis when he had recently just stopped having one himself? Then it hit him: maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Shiro might not have had any people out here, but he did have a place of origin. If he was a clone, would he feel the slightest connection to where he was made? Back at the facility, would they answer any questions? 

When Shiro tripped finding a chair to sit down at for breakfast the next morning, Keith blamed himself. If Shiro hadn’t been so concerned with trying to protect him, maybe he would have ended up happier. Maybe Keith would have died, but Shiro would have been free. So many “what if”s..

\---

“Keith, has it ever crossed your mind how long you’ve been away from home?” Hunk asked tentatively when they were all circled up aft of the bridge. Shiro’s spot stood vacant, the black paladin still catching up on the need for sleep brought about by his injury.

They needed to go back to the cloning facility. It creeped Keith out, seeing as the rows upon rows of Shiro meant that his friend had been treated as no more than an object, but Shiro didn’t need to know how viscerally that disturbed him.

“No. I mean, sure, it’s been a long time, but I’ve always wanted to go to space...there’s still a lot left to explore,” Keith answered lamely, getting an inkling than there was more to the question than Hunk was letting on.

“Exploring is nice, but we were thinking it would also be nice if we slowed down for awhile. Your citizens must be curious about your adventures after all this time,” Allura chimed in.

“Why are you thinking of going to Earth? It isn’t even your planet,” Keith said, although it came out harsher than he intended, “Besides, we still need to find Shiro.”

“Don’t talk to Allura that way!” Lance reproached. Keith rolled his eyes. “Maybe I’ve been telling her some great things like how the sun sets over the ocean and how most of everyone in America _loves_ nice girls and aliens.” 

“No, but it is a home to some race. _Your_ race. And I feel that since I can fit in with you, maybe I can fit in with them, and feel...the comfort of calling a place home. Sort of a vicarious...nevermind,” Allura said, blushing.

“I haven’t seen Dad and Matt in some while. Mom probably thinks I’ve dropped off the face of the universe, which is possible since science thinks it’s flat.”

“You too, Pidge?” Keith asked, turning to her. She was his last bastion of hope, but she was in on it, too. They had to have discussed this behind his back. To be fair, he had been spending a lot of time alone with Shiro lately, but they could have at least told him they were talking about it.

She shrugged. “Yeah. We have been away for a long time. I don’t have home in a person.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have Shiro. And an alien mom. But my family’s back on Earth.”

Then he knew why they looked at him so differently, when it became known that he was Galra. He belonged out here, and they didn’t. Back when Shiro was here, he was one of the lucky ones.

“It’s okay,” Pidge continued, “Shiro means a lot to all of us. We won’t go until you find him. We just miss it, that’s all. We were wondering if you felt the same.” 

Keith thought about it, and decided it would be nice to wake up again to the hot desert air, even to get sunburned once in a while when he went out and it was particularly bad, but still--he'd rather be with Shiro. The team was flummoxed at first when he returned and announced that he actually wasn’t Shiro, but the cloning facility was almost proof, and their final lead. They had already confronted Shiro, and confronted Lotor. After that, there was no climax, no time limit to tell them when their time to search for Shiro was up. He couldn’t keep them waiting forever.

“How’s that visor coming?”

“It’s good. Almost finished, actually, we just need to test it out.”

“It’s being difficult, though, Shiro’s body keeps rejecting it. It should work for a little while, though,” said Hunk.

“That’s all we need.” If Shiro could see going back to the cloning facility, he could help Keith figure this out.

\---

“Why do we need to go back there again? I still think Shiro’s with the Galra,” said Shiro.

“You need to know more about your origin. I didn’t know that I was Galra until a couple years ago, and finding out and working with the Blades helped me grow more confident in who I am. Same with finding my mother. You become more sure of yourself.”

Shiro considered. “You’d go with me?”

“Of course. I’m just as concerned with this as you are.”

“Because you don’t want to love a clone.”

“No, _you_ don’t want to love a clone,” Keith shot back. That settled it. “And stop saying that. You know, it’s really stuck in my head that you...did what you did when I found you. I don’t think that any clone controlled by someone could do that if they weren’t their own, sentient being, and for me, no less. ‘You're a clone?’ It can’t be that simple.”

“An advanced clone?”

“That, maybe.” He was going to say something about how biologists on Earth would have scrambled for this breakthrough, but he was sure Shiro had had enough of scientists going gaga thinking they possessed a technological marvel. If Shiro hadn't, then Keith had. When they found him after Kerberos, they wanted to study him. Instead, he brought up something he had heard in his quantum physics class, the one he had taken a few years after Shiro on his recommendation. “Did they ever tell you about the no-cloning theory in quantum physics class?”

“The one I suggested you take?”

“Yeah, and that was a whole lot of work,” Keith harrumphed.

“But you were good at it.”

Keith grumbled.

“I knew you would be.” Shiro really had to stop complimenting him when he was off his guard. “That was a long time ago. But yes, I remember. ‘Replicating something down to its very atomic structure is impossible. You can get the atoms right, but to get everything spinning with the same time and momentum won’t work.’”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t see your point. Maybe down at that level, I’m different, but everything else is the same--”

“Not everything.”

“Not… _everything_ , but if some part of me is different from the original Shiro, the Shiro you knew, I’m not unique. I’m just… _wrong_.” Shiro exhaled harshly and Keith could see the pain he was trying to keep a handle on inside. Keith sat on the bed next to where Shiro flopped back, relaxed, and brushed the fringe away from his brow before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be touching Shiro. What a strange concept.

He never wanted to hear Shiro’s voice take on the quality it had, dripping with scorn directed at himself, but he had to know it was there; worse were the times when Shiro was in pain and didn’t tell him, and Keith would find him worse later on. 

“When you came back to Earth...you said your arm was ‘wrong’, too. You hated having alien tech attached to your body through no choice of your own. Thought it was unnatural. But that arm saved us so many times--it saved you, for me. Defeated Zarkon.”

Shiro was about to interrupt, but Keith silenced him.

“You know, Shiro always hated himself, too, so whether you are him or aren’t him, that isn’t really different--”

“That’s not the point.”

“You aren’t helping your case, here,” Keith said, smiling. “But I’m not the same either.” Keith thought back to when Shiro’s face had first appeared on the bridge of the Syncline ship and he stuttered so adorably. “I left Voltron, disappeared and came back two years older, and you didn’t see me through any of that. That must have been a shock. We all change, all become different. If anything, I should be lucky I came back to a man so familiar.”

“I like the new you. And the old you, although you were a little hot-tempered, at times.” Keith knew when Shiro was ribbing him and he was only saying that because Keith didn’t want to be hot-tempered, had said on many occasions that he wished he had been nicer to some people (Lance). Knew Shiro doesn’t say he was stubborn because he was still stubborn, and proud of it. “I wish I could see you.”

Shiro reached out towards the sound of Keith’s voice until his fingertips brushed Keith’s face, inelegant in touch indiscriminate until finding the bow of a lip, the curve of a jaw--features that would let him trace as if he were drinking his fill. Keith pulled back as soon as he reached this stage. Shiro didn’t get to trace.

“Please.”

Keith stayed still.

“Keith, are you there?” Shiro’s voice came high and panicked. 

“I’m here, I’m here.” Keith placed a hand on Shiro's chest before taking Shiro’s hand in his and guiding it to his face. 

“Sorry, I’m not used to being blind--”

Then Keith realized that touching things might have meant something new entirely to Shiro, not just a way to connect with people you already knew were there. “I’m sorry. What I said earlier, about you not touching me, was selfish.” Shiro was going through some stuff. He had to respect that. 

He thought Shiro touched his face just to orient himself, but his hands lingered longer than necessary. He brushed Keith’s eyelashes, carefully felt over his eyelids, and after trailing down his nose, contemplatively rubbed back and forth over his bottom lip. Keith allowed this to go on for some time before biting at Shiro’s thumb, then pressing a kiss to his palm before he could pull away.

“Whatever you want, I won’t push. Just know that Shiro or not, there’s room in my heart for two.”

\---

Keith waved five fingers in front of the green visor on Shiro’s face, fluttering them to catch his attention.

Shiro waved back.

“These are awesome! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this earlier.

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Shiro confessed. “I know how hard it is for you to watch me stumble around like this, every time I knock something over, you suck in a breath through your teeth, and when I cut my thumb the other day, your entire body went rigid.”

“I don’t react that much.” 

“If you say so,” Shiro teased. Keith forgot that he’d become so perceptive. It was great when they were going about their everyday lives, but now it was more curse than blessing. 

“How are your eyes? Good enough to remove the blindfold yet, or do you still need to keep it on?” 

“I think we should keep it on,” Shiro said as he removed the visor and placed it on his nightstand. Keith picked up the cloth there and tied it back around his head, tight enough to not slip down but not so tight that it dug into his skin. Shiro reached for the knot at the back of his head but didn’t untie it, so Keith moved on and opted to pay attention to the scarred tissue where the metal used to join Shiro’s arm, caressing and soothing. He must have done a good job.

\---

Back at the asteroid, they searched from top to bottom. Most rooms were deserted as Keith suspected; all they found were a couple of journals. Since Keith had learned to read Galra during his time with the Blades, and Shiro had knowledge of the script coded into him in ways he couldn’t explain, they decoded the text relatively quickly upon their return to Black.

_“A human’s memory is not contained within their DNA.”_

_“Attempts to extract the memories of the subject directly from the source have failed. It was determined that the best method of use would be to divide his quintessence akin to what many have called a soul…”_

“A soul?” Shiro dug his fingers into Keith’s leg. “How many times was this done?”

It didn’t say. Keith read Shiro’s journal, Shiro read his, twice at least--it didn’t say.

_“A plan to embed a sleeper agent within the ranks of Voltron; they would never suspect one of their own.”_

He had no way of knowing if every clone on the surface had a piece of Shiro’s quintessence, or if they were empty vessels..how much quintessence had been left in _Shiro_ , for that matter, if he was even alive, but he refused to think any other way.

Even here, they were still no closer to figuring out where he was. 

Keith shut the journal on his lap, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “Guess I’m not going home.”

“So what, you’re just going to waste away here?”

“Yes. And you can stay with me or leave until someone finds me.”

Shiro sat behind him and circled his arms around his chest. Keith had to admit it felt nice to lean back against Shiro, all that strong muscle--like a giant pillow.

“Baby, you’re so stubborn.”

“I guess..you’re all I have of him now. There’s some of him within you left.”

Keith turned his head up to look at Shiro, hair caught and messy where it was pressed against his armor. He still didn’t know if the cloning process killed Shiro, and they just hadn’t documented it, or if he really was out there somewhere beyond their reach.

But this Shiro was really close.

“You know, we have all the information and perfectly good machines, let’s clone me to see if we can get closer to the answer.”

“We’re not cloning you.”

“Why not?” 

Shiro closed the distance until his nose bumped against Keith’s, and before he knew it they were sliding together until their lips found each other, too. 

Shiro’s lips were dry. They weren’t chapped, or anything, but they weren’t wet, either. Just soft. 

Keith decided to change that by biting Shiro’s lower lip between his teeth and opening up the kiss. All he wanted was Shiro.

“Wait a second.”

“What?” 

Besides the lack of Shiro, this was exactly the fantasy he had imagined. Shiro had better make this quick.

“You said ‘there's some of him left in me’.”

“So?”

“Maybe he can feel this, wherever he is.”

“Okay, let’s try.”

Pretty soon Shiro was sitting in Black’s chair with Keith straddling his lap, the lower halves of their armor stripped down to the undersuit so he could grind down indiscriminately. As he rocked back and forth, the sounds Shiro made just made him want to kiss him more, he was so lovely--Shiro was already eagerly pressing into his mouth, but the next time Keith made sure to delve his tongue in deep, not uncomfortably so but just enough to taste him completely and show him he was Keith’s.

“You think he can feel this?” Keith asked between breaths.

“Hnnn--” 

Shiro’s hips snapped up beneath him.

“Because if he doesn’t, I’m sure as hell going to make him.” 

Making sure to keep up the steady grind, Keith pulled away from Shiro’s mouth in favor of peppering kisses along his jaw leading down to his neck. Every time he whined, he pulled Keith’s heart down a few inches because that meant either he really had fallen hard for Keith or no one had touched him like this before, which was sad.

He trailed kisses all the way down Shiro’s armor, and stopped over his waist. They weren’t ready for this kind of intimacy, but he was desperate.

Then the whole world stopped.

\---

Shiro stood in front of him, the infinite cosmos behind him, palm over his eyes.

He was glad their plan had worked, but now that Shiro was standing in front of him, he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed.

“Shiro?” he called. The figure looked up. “You’re here. I am so sorry I had no idea how to find you he was the only thing left--”

“Keith.” Shiro stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. You had no other way.”

“Could you feel it?”

“No. But I remember how it feels, if only faintly.”

“Where are we?”

“The consciousness of the Black Lion. She saved me after my fight with Zarkon.”

“We need to get you back into your body,” Keith said.

“Lost. I think it burned up while I was in the astral plane.”

“That’s not a problem. We can just use a clone.” 

“Would you--want me to take a younger body? When I came back from Kerberos I know I looked pretty unfamiliar--”

“That’s not it. Your eyes are damaged, and it’ll take a long time to heal, if they heal at all.”

Suddenly, their surroundings changed, and Keith found himself back on one of the platforms, looking up at one of Shiro’s bodies incubated in pink fluid. He suspected this was a natural effect of the astral plane, a realm shaped by wishes and dreams--either this was real, or they had stepped into a parallel dimension, a mirror of the one that really existed. Keith reached out to touch the glass, but his fingers passed right through.

“My old body...or should I say, my younger body...honestly, I don’t think I’d fit into it anymore. So much has happened. I should be an old man.”

Keith took one more look at the floating body, unsettled by how the light turned the angles so unnatural. He was too perfect. Fabricated.

“I’d miss your scars. I know you never were too fond of them, but I always saw them as a reminder of how amazing you are, to have fought so hard to live through so much.”

Again, the stars swallowed them up as if it was all they had. 

“You liked those?”

“Of course, why wouldn’t I?”

Shiro cleared his throat and Keith resisted the urge to step away and put some distance between them. He felt unusually bare on the astral plane, even though they were both fully clothed, not sure if it was the fact that it was only their essence talking or if it was because there was nothing there for either of them to focus on in the background, nothing except each other.

He had never told Shiro that, that he liked his scars. One time, when they were sparring and Shiro removed his shirt, Keith let his eyes linger too long on the supernova etched into his pectoral, and he kept his shirt on more often than not, after that. Keith chalked it up to Shiro being creeped out by his ogling, and only later did it occur to him that he might have been self-conscious.

“But could we move you into Shiro’s body? He’s his own person.”

“He’s not his own person. He’s me, you said it yourself.” 

“Still, we should probably ask him. All I know is that your body once caused you a lot of pain, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

“Keith, sometimes pain is a part of life. It’s unavoidable.” Keith shook his head. “Besides, we don’t even know if any of the other clones will come alive. They had quite a difficult time experimenting, if those journals were correct.”

“There’ll be complications no matter what we do. I don’t understand, though. You have another chance, why not go for the best option?”

Sure, it would be nice to have the Shiro he knew and the Shiro he was coming to know all conveniently wrapped in the same package, but that was too easy. Life wasn’t a series of threads like a book that could be neatly tied off at the end, with everything working out.

“That version of me, even while the arm controlled him, was able to hurt himself to stop from hurting you. I trust him, if that makes any sense.”

“Even though he damaged his own eyes?” 

“He didn’t have a choice. I’ve been terrified this whole time that I was a monster, ever since I came back from Kerberos. In my worst nightmares, I turn on you and Pidge and Lance, all of Voltron. Even Coran. But he didn’t. Mind-wiped, Galra-controlled, still not able to hurt you. If he hadn’t been able to gain control and not fight you, we might not be here today.”

Besides, how can I live without the memory of those wonderful things you said after? I can be aware of what was said from a distance all day, but that’s nothing compared to hearing it from you.”

“I love you, Shiro, you don’t have to be him to hear it.”

“I know, but there’s nothing quite like the first time.” Shiro smirked, but quickly wiped the smile off his face before it could grow into anything bigger. Keith’s eyes were beginning to sting. 

“I won’t be able to watch the stars with you like I used to, or ride hoverbikes, but we’ll create new things to do together. The idea of a blind person being able to master martial arts isn’t completely a fiction, you know.”

“Is that what you’re going to do when you get back?”

“ _If_ I get back.”

“ _If?_ Have a little faith, here. When have we not pulled through?”

“Keith, I’m _dead_. If this doesn’t work out, I want you to accept that.”

“Who cares?”

“Keith, please. If this doesn’t work out, I need you to release me when the team isn’t around anymore. I don’t know if I’ll be here forever, or if I’ll eventually fade away, but don’t forget about me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Keith said, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. 

Then he realized--if he was constantly bracing for a fight, Shiro braced himself for pain. Few good things had happened in their lives lately, and Shiro said himself that he wished he could accept the good things more when they came.

He looked down at the transparent shape of his body, glowing blue. What a strange place. He didn’t know any of its laws or properties, the fundamentals that made it work. But he knew a few people who did. If he could find them, maybe things would all work out.

\---

He came to to Shiro kneeling on the floor, one hand cradling his face.

“Keith? Keith, what happened? Did it work? You scared me for a second there.”

“Yeah, everything’s fine. Shiro’s in Black’s consciousness, waiting for us to get him out. He doesn’t have a body.”

“Why don’t we put him in me? Unless Shiro doesn’t want that. I’ve done a lot of terrible things.”

Many times, after he and Shiro had gotten back on speaking terms, Shiro complained about an emptiness inside that transcended feeling lonely. He described it as ‘feeling like something was missing’--like someone had cut him in half and put him together, but only given him two-thirds.

Looking back, it made sense, if he was a tiny shred of Shiro’s soul. 

“No, he does. He wants you.”

Shiro leaned in to resume their activities, but Keith held him off.

“Let’s wait until Shiro gets back. We never did this before you, and I’d like to let him--well, you--have a chance to decide whether you still want it.”

“Okay.”


End file.
